What makes you so sure? The dragon transforms its appearance a lot over the course of the four games. Compare the dragon pup at the start of Zwei to the Blue Dragon at the end of the game to see that they can have totally different appearances.
The dragon could have lost a lot of it’s power at the end of Panzer Dragoon after destroying the Tower… forcing it to ?demorph? so to speak. The Basic Wing from the start of Saga has many similarities to the Blue Dragon, so perhaps it lost much of it’s power and has to revert to a lesser form after destroying the Tower. This is not just random speculation either, I’m also basing it on the fact that the PDS dragon reverted to a lesser form after defeating Sestren - the Base Wing from Panzer Dragoon Orta. One might say that the Base Wing was a step forward, but if you compare how powerful the unlockable Blue Dragon is, I’d say this is far from the case.
Of course. A lot of this is just brainstorming, tieing the loose ends together. There’s a lot that isn’t set in stone…
That’s actually quite a good theory… give me some time, and I’ll see if I can’t pick any holes in it
Solo : we know that Lagi (the pup) and the PDS dragonn aren’t the sdame physicall chararcter for a fact do we not?
Did he?You pretty much have the same data for the two cases.Who can say for sure that the dragon was indeed “sleeping” for all those years between Saga and Orta?PDO’s first trailer hints at a Base Wing crest out there.But how can we be sure of the timeframe when that transformation happened?The Base Wing could be in the middle or at the end of a different evolutionary path we don’t know about…
Oh right, you mean the pup that comes out of Shelcoof in PDS? Well, yeah that has to be a different physical dragon than Edge’s Dragon because they’re together at the same time. If they weren’t different physical dragons, that would be rather odd
What I meant was that the dragon pup in PDS isn’t necessarily Lagi. It could well be Lagi’s offspring.
[quote=“GehnTheBerserker”]
Did he?You pretty much have the same data for the two cases.Who can say for sure that the dragon was indeed “sleeping” for all those years between Saga and Orta?PDO’s first trailer hints at a Base Wing crest out there.But how can we be sure of the timeframe when that transformation happened?The Base Wing could be in the middle or at the end of a different evolutionary path we don’t know about…[/quote]
Base Wing implies that it was a “starting” form. But even if that isn’t the case, Edge’s Dragon would have had to have taken a backwards step when it became the Base Wing… which I why I think the same thing could easily have happened when Kyle’s Dragon blew up the Tower in Panzer Dragoon 1… except instead of reverting to the Base Wing he became the Basic Wing that we see at the start of Saga.
There seems to me that there’s more evidence that the dragon “demorphed” at certain stages in his life, than there is that he died at the end of Panzer Dragoon Zwei. Remember Lundi’s Journals are questionable because of Panzer Dragoon Saga’s not-so-accurate translation. When Lundi said that Lagi “discarded his body, and entered a deep sleep” it could have actually been “laid down his body and entered a deep sleep” or something - who knows?
You getting it mized up
When I say Base Wing I mean the one in Orta not the Basic Wing from Saga.
I’m pretty sure The dragon in Zwei doesn’t die.And I’m pretty sure the dragon in PD1 doesn’t die (the footprints are proof like you said ; i was just brainstorming i wasn’t saying eh actually did die).And I’m sure the dragon in Saga didn’t die.
Either that or they all died -I think the ending of Orta is trying to show us that when dragons are “exhausted” they die but a pup appears in their place.
So that would explain why a pup appeared in the Shelcoof crest.
Well I guess there is a possibility that they all died, and were replaced by a pup in each game… except that if that was case, then what replaced Lagi at the end of PDZ? The pup in Shelcoof couldn’t have appeared in Saga if that was the case, because it would have become the dragon in PD1…
Also, what I meant before was that the Base Wing in Orta was actually a “demorphed” Solo Wing… it wasn’t a different body altogether, it was the same physical dragon.
For all we knwo the same dragon can seal itself in the same crest more than once.But this is just a bit of brainstorming.I want to rpesent my complete thoughts on this via theory.I’m still writing my Heresy theory.
That’s why I wanted to see the movies from PDS.I forgot mots of the content of the Sestren Orbs…
Yeah, I check eBay fairly regularly myself at the moment, and the guides only rarely crop up. In the last few months I’ve picked up the Die Welt von Panzer Dragoon Zwei artbook and V-Jump’s not-massively-interesting Azel guidebook, but that’s all I’ve seen…
Oh yeah, I’ll do some sort of an update for TWotA’s maps section when you scan those - there were a couple of things I felt I should add to / improve in the existing stuff, too…
That’s the impression I get too, and as I said above I’m quite convinced that Team Andromeda meant to portray Lagi as “the young PD1 dragon” when they made Panzer Dragoon Zwei. However, TA seemed to expand and flesh out the storyline in all sorts of ways when they made PDS, confirming and describing many things that had been left hanging before, which is why I suspect that they may have decided on the “different dragons” idea in the end. Questionable translations aside, the whole dragon ghost / dragon crest / dragon pup sequence in PDS seems like such a strong indication of there being different dragons (to me) that I can’t help but re-evaluate what PDZ implied, in relation to what TA might ultimately have intended players to think when they’d finished the trilogy.
Storyline-wise, certainly; in context though, TA didn’t make a great deal of new footage for the memory orbs - there was only really the dragon-program clips, and a couple of recreated scenes from PDZ. Team Andromeda must have been on some kind of time limit and budget for the FMVs, and they seemed to enjoy leaving some things mysterious, too; for example, the dragon crests themselves were never explicitly explained, as the player was left to put the scattered pieces of knowledge together and arrive at their own conclusions. I’d assume that a similar thing was going on with the different dragons issue, if this was indeed the case.
I tried to cover that issue in the theory write-up, as I suspect that the PD1 dragon was meant to be physically exhausted after destroying a Tower too, even if it didn’t pass away immediately. My line of thought is that the PDS dragon was meant to be the PD1 dragon “reborn” from the Excavation Site #4 dragon crest - with a new, weaker body - just as I’m speculating that Lagi may have been reborn from that crest in Shelcoof. I explored that idea in more detail on page two of the theory article, if anyone was curious:
Looking at it the other way around, if the dragon had simply lived on, why would it vanish from the world for several decades - and why would it leave Kyle, who by then must have been an experienced and able rider, behind? I strongly suspect that the dragon was meant to be physically exhausted after destroying the PD1 Tower, as its disappearance would be quite unexplained otherwise.
I’ve actually thought about that. If the dragon in PDS was indeed meant to be the PD1 dragon reborn, then we can assume that it’s meant to take quite a while for a dragon crest to generate a new body for a dragon - in this case, about thirty years. PD1 took place less than twenty years after PDZ though, so we might assume that Lagi’s new pup body hadn’t been finished by then. The dragon-program presumably wanted to take action against the PD1 Tower (which the Empire had discovered) though, so it would have been forced to seek out a new creature to guide if this was the case.
Also, Shelcoof had started repairing itself and had become surrounded by pure-type sentries and an impassable tornado at some point between PDZ and PDS; even if the dragon-program returned to the crest and awakened the pup itself, it presumably wouldn’t have survived its escape from the vessel, being as weak and defenceless as it was. I’m guessing that Edge effectively “rescued” that dragon pup from Shelcoof in PDS.
Team Andromeda developed Panzer Dragoon Zwei and Panzer Dragoon Saga simultaneously. I would have thought that since both teams (they split into two teams) were working together to complete the trilogy, they would have made sure that both stories were compatible and consistent. We know that the whole crest issue was brought up in both games, and I think we can both agree that it was one of the major linking points of the two games. What I trying to say here is that, it seems unlikely to me that Team Andromeda would change the story at the last minute (or after Zwei was released) when they would’ve already planned a perfectly good story by making Zwei a prequel which explains how the dragon grew up. Panzer Dragoon 1 always seemed the story with the most holes in it to me.
Possibly, but at the same time I can’t help thinking that a dragon “ghost” is a bit too fantasy for the likes of the Panzer Dragoon world. Basically everything else in the Saturn trilogy was quite scientific, and avoided confirming anything supernatural. Obviously a lot of the things that happen in the games wouldn’t be possible in real life, but I get the feeling that Team Andromeda’s world wasn’t one that involved the super natural, with the exception of the Divine Visitor.
Wouldn’t it make more sense if the dragon ghost was actually a hologram of Lagi’s final form in Panzer Dragoon Zwei? Lagi could have created it using the Ancient technology and left it behind to guide Edge when he went there to retrieve the dragon pup.
They probably didn’t have enough resources to cover everything that they wanted to, but at the same time it seems (to me) more like Sestren’s memory orbs were the story of one dragon’s life than three dragon’s lives. There’s nothing in there that suggests that the Heresy program ever left the body of Lagi, nor have we any way of knowing that the Heresy program could return to Sestren through the crests to then be downloaded into a new body? it?s hard to be sure either way here, but it seems more likely that it was a single dragon in this case.
Something I’d like to know to better understand your theory: Do you think that the dragon’s mind, as in Lagi the coolia’s mind/consciousness is the same in each of the different dragons that you talk about in your theory, or do you think that each dragon has it’s own mind which dies at the end of each game and the only thing that makes the dragons the same is the program that they use is the same in all three games?
My personal view on this is that Kyle’s dragon was exhausted after the end of Panzer Dragoon and that he had to go into hibernation because of this, awakening just before Azel was discovered in a healed but still lesser form. According to much questionable diaries of Skiad Ops Endow, Lagi went into a ?deep sleep? at the end of Panzer Dragoon Zwei as well, which suggests hibernation, although of course such translations are very questionable…
This is true, but I don’t get the impression that Team Andromeda had truly finalised these things by the time PDZ was finished. For example, the other big link is the Tower of Uru that we see in Lundi’s visions at the end of the game, but that Tower and the dragon flying towards it look considerably different from the final designs settled on for PDS. The RPG was in development for a good two years after Zwei’s release, and with the Zwei team merging with the PDS team I’d assume that those years were the most productive; I wouldn’t expect the team to have completely finalised the extensive PDS storyline (and how the games would ultimately link up) by that relatively early stage.
I’m not so much trying to suggest that they changed the story between PDZ and PDS, only that the story in PDZ didn’t seem to be set in stone; the PDZ plot was still fairly light and open-ended, and we were never literally told that Lagi was the PD1 dragon. That was essentially something that most people would take for granted (myself included, of course) when they first played the game, rather than something that was a confirmed part of the storyline.
Do you mean “the story with the most Sky Rider in it”? Or were there other things that you found hole-ish about the PD1 storyline?
Certainly, what I really mean is that the “ghost dragon” seemed like some sort of energy-manifestation of Lagi’s mind or consciousness; I’m assuming of course that Lagi was the dragon pup in the crest, and as the “ghost dragon” emerged from the crest room and returned to it, it could very well have been enabled by the ancient technology in the crest (to provide a scientific explanation).
What strikes me as important is that Team Andromeda specifically used the 3D model for the Solo Wing from Panzer Dragoon Zwei for that spectral dragon. The last time we definitely saw Lagi in the series, he was disappearing into Shelcoof at the end of PDZ in that very Solo Wing form; it was then implied that he’d entered into the dragon crest. As the “ghost” emerges from the crest and returns to the crest, it’s always seemed to me that it was meant to be a manifestation of what was in the crest, in a form that the player would easily recognise: the full-grown Lagi, who was last seen in that very place. And of course, the creature that emerges from the crest literally looks like a “brand-new Lagi”, making me suspect that he’s meant to be that previous dragon - finally emerging from the ancient technology of the crest with a fresh body to replace his old exhausted one.
But if Lagi had then gone on to become Edge’s dragon, why would he need to leave a hologram to guide himself back to the crest he once inhabited? I would have thought that would be an unnecessarily confusing plot point… (not that any interpretation of this avoids confusion, of course. )
On the other hand, I’m inclined to view the dragon ghost / crest / pup sequence as something that actually explains the ending to Panzer Dragoon Zwei. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that the PDZ ending seemed quite vague and unresolved when taken alone - for example, what was the dragon crest meant to be? Was Lagi meant to be alive or dead? The crest / pup sequence in PDS seems to me as if it’s meant to resolve that open ending - making sense of it by showing Lagi finally emerging from the crest.
To be honest I’ve always thought of the orbs as the story of the dragon-program itself, rather than the physical dragons(s) that it guided; the sequence starts off by showing us the black program getting “kicked out” of the Sestren network, then charts its journeys up to the present, and after the battle with Sestren Exsis the program’s story is brought to a close.
I’m afraid the theory that the crests were gateways to Sestren is someone else’s idea entirely; we know so little about the dragon-program that I really don’t know what it would do if it indeed left the physical dragon, so I didn’t explore that area in my theory.
On the other hand, although the orbs don’t show us the dragon-program leaving one dragon and moving onto the next, they also don’t show Lagi emerging from the Shelcoof crest early in order to become the PD1 dragon. We can be quite certain that Lagi did indeed enter into that crest at the end of PDZ, but the only thing we ever see coming out of that crest is the dragon pup in PDS; that point at least seems to imply that the pup would be Lagi, emerging with a rejuvenated body. With both of our explanations the memory orbs aren’t really telling the whole story though, because they essentially stick to the information in the games; they still don’t show us what happens between the games, which is what we’d need to confirm either explanation.
The dragon growth image that I made to go along with my theory write-up is probably a good reference for this:
Basically I’m proposing that there were two physical dragons: Lagi (who began his life in PDZ), and the PD1 dragon (whose origins would be unknown, just like his rider’s). After destroying Shelcoof and exhausting his body, Lagi would have entered into the dragon crest inside Shelcoof, and eventually emerged with a new body: the dragon pup that we see in PDS. Likewise, the PD1 dragon would have exhausted itself by destroying the PD1 Tower, and it would also have entered into a crest - the one we see below Excavation Site #4 - and emerged with a new body: it would become the dragon that Edge encounters as the Basic Wing in PDS.
So really I’m not suggesting that any dragons “died” until the end of Panzer Dragoon Orta; only that their original bodies were exhausted beyond repair, which forced them to enter into their respective dragon crests in order to one day emerge with a rejuvenated physical form. PDS eventually showed Edge’s dragon and the pup (which I’m suggesting is Lagi) literally merging together to become one creature: the final Solo Wing, which went on to become the Panzer Dragoon Orta dragon.
